A sunny end to March

It has been a glorious week, temperatures in the late teens and early twenty degrees centigrade - fantastic! It meant that we could empty the store shed and sort everything out without worrying about things getting wet. Well this was the scene on day one.

And this is only half of it! All of these chairs need work, some more than others, but it was so good to be able to get them all out and check them over before cleaning and re-stacking them in the now much tidier shed.

We need more space....again! One day was spent doing the aforementioned shed reorganisation, another day, (the hottest of the week) was spent sorting out our other lock up store at our friends yard. I was burning rubbish until 4pm, oh boy was it hot! I couldn't wait to jump in the bath when I got home. Never mind, we now have one very clean store.

So why the frantic activity you may ask? Well we have some materials arriving next week....

This is one stack, there is another! More details about this lot later in the week, but a little bird tells me it may SNOW on Wednesday!

A talk for the Stickmakers Association

What fabulous weather! March, but it feels warmer than a normal July - unbelievable.

On Saturday we zoomed up country to meet a very nice man who has an unenviable task. He is overseeing the final closure of one of the last remaining rattan furniture manufacturers in this country. Four generations of expertise gone - whoosh. It was painful to listen to the stories of the past, the entrepreneurship, the innovation and the camaraderie of so many workers whilst knowing all the time that this is the end of it. All of that knowledge is consigned to the past. I wished that some of our politicians could have been there to witness first hand what is happening to so many valuable artisan skills in their desire to turn us into some kind of centre for administration. Without manufacturing who's going to need administrators? If we produce nothing then we have nothing to administrate - now that would balance the books for the accountants wouldn't it! You can probably tell, it all upset me a lot.

On the way home we stopped off in Woodstock for a bite to eat.

Anyway Sunday was something completely different. We were asked in August last year if we would like to do a talk and presentation for the Stickmakers Association this March - well of course we would. So yesterday was the day. We went along with our computing stuff and gave a slideshow potted history and talk about our work here as Former Glory. A few people had bought along restoration projects that they wanted to discuss and all in all we had a lovely time.

A weekend of contrasts and glorious weather.

Seagrass weaving with a bit of crochet

I mentioned this bit of weaving at the weekend. The African carved chair with an unusual weave and technique. Originally it looks like it was woven in some kind of hemp, well I couldn't really use that this time! So I opted for a fine corded seagrass instead. It was difficult enough making sure that the diamond weaving met centrally on all four rails, but even worse was the unusual crocheted method of double strands around the edge of the seat. I got there in the end....

The green will fade to a caramel colour in a couple of years, so should look very similar to the original.

And here's a close up of that crocheted edge. I like it and will use it somewhere else for something else, sometime!!

Mothering Sunday

The weather was good and I got everything I could ask for, peace and quiet and these........

Hehehe!!

Now back to reality working on this.

This was taken last week, hopefully I'll have an update later today.

Did I sleep through another week?

Where does the time go? Seriously I can't believe how quickly the weeks have passed by. What is it they say, time flies when you're enjoying yourself?

We are very busy indeed which is probably why the days all melt together, but with Spring apparently already here, it's difficult to not want to be outside and enjoy it, at least a little bit. We did spend a few very productive hours outside over the weekend, sealing rush chair seats.....again! A couple of weeks ago it was 50 seat pads for a restaurant, this weekend it was the 45 chapel chairs for St. Michael's Mount. I'm not usually happy or keen to show us in photos, but here's an exception.

This was taken by our son just before we began the task of sealing them all. By the time we'd finished the sun was setting. We are feeling proud of ourselves that we managed to finish this batch ahead of target. This photo's for posterity!

On Sunday my youngest son and I went to a local garden centre for lunch, it was a couple of hours of sheer bliss. We even bought an apple tree and then fell about laughing whilst trying to make it fit into his VERY small car. We did it and "Stewart" as the tree is now christened, is planted in the garden and has already started to bud. I'm looking forward to watching "him" grow, he has two different varieties of apple spliced onto one main root stock - two flavours for the price of one!

And to sum up the weekend, a photo of my "bargain basement bulbs" from last year.

Sunny Swanage

My other half decided that enough was enough yesterday afternoon, so we went for a drive. I'm never really sure where we'll end up when he says this and to be honest, I don't think he does either half the time! We found ourselves in Swanage on what turned out to be a fantastic sunny afternoon. It is one of those places that we are often drawn back to, a sleepy seaside town that in so many ways has never left the 1950's and there's something really nice about that! I'll let the photos speak for themselves.....

Looking down from the gardens to the pier and cliffs.

Swanage town.

One of the painted murals on the now derelict old pier head building.

And another.

The visit has recharged my batteries no end. There is an album of photos on our Facebook page

Fridays finished jobs

It has been a looooong week. Lots of little jobs have finally been finished thankfully, although lots of the bigger jobs seem to be taking forever. So what did we do....?

Two of these "looped" Danish cord chairs, but unfortunately when they were collected today they were replaced with two more.

A repair to a bad split along the cane rail in this window seat.

Made and replaced a missing detail bracket on a Morris armchair.

Restored this lovely old bodgers stool.

And finally we oiled and dried this lot for a restaurant in London.

There were loads of other bits inbetween, I'm still chugging away at the Gio Ponti seats and gluing up various chair frames......... Thank goodness it's the weekend.